I thought these things at various times; they occurred to me over a number of days. My mind wandered into and out of the subject. Preoccupied with it at times, I dropped and broke things or got off the bus at the wrong stop or stumbled on the curbstone, holding my textbooks in one hand, their spines turned upward leaning against my thigh, in the style of a sharp high-school boy. Girls at school told me I was looking “a lot more mature.”
Every once in a while, I would remember something: Doris saying angrily, “I pushed my brothers, I put every idea they had into their heads, I was somebody in that little town”—in Illinois—“people thought I was something, it was me that gave my brothers a name; that’s all it takes to win an election, a name. J.J. was mayor, Mose was police commissioner—You don’t think it did them some good? And I put
them over. They looked
Jewish
—it was
my
looks, me and Joe; Joe was in the American Legion: believe me, that helped. And it was all my idea. Momma never wanted us to do nothing, Momma thought the Gentiles would kill us if we got to be too outstanding. She was always in Russia in her mind. I was the smartest one—Momma and my brothers weren’t as smart as I was. I could always get people to do what I wanted. Who do you think told J.J. what to wear? I taught him how to look like a businessman so he could go into St. Louis and people wouldn’t laugh at him. I found him his wife, he owes me a lot. But I have to give him credit, he’s the only one who had brains, he’s the only one who did anything with what I told him. If you ask me, Mose can’t count to fifteen without getting a headache, and Joe was not smart, either. Joe was vain: when he went bald I had to fight with him to take off his hat in the house. He did have pretty hair; he was too blond to be a Jew. But everything was a pose with him, he never did anything because it was smart, it was always Joe putting his hand in his pocket and being a big shot—believe me, a lot of women thought he was attractive. But you couldn’t talk to Joe, no one could ever talk to Joe, he wouldn’t listen, he had his own ideas—ideas! I’m the one to say it, I married him, I made my bed—he was dumb: I had to have the brains for both of us. But good-looking, my God. The first time I saw him I couldn’t believe it, he was so good-looking: I didn’t think he was Jewish. He was in an officer’s uniform. You can imagine. I was never photogenic but I was something to look at, myself. Joe took one look at me and he didn’t know if he was coming or going. He cut in on me at a dance and asked me to marry him just like that and he meant it. He meant well. I really wasn’t bad-looking: people always told me everything. I was too pretty when I was young to make it in St. Louis—older women ran things in St. Louis—you think I didn’t catch on? St. Louis is a good town for a woman when you get older: I know what I’m talking about. I knew the right time to move here. If Joe had been a businessman, we could have caught up with J.J.—we had good chances, people liked me, but Joe didn’t go over, he didn’t make friends with smart people, he wouldn’t take my advice. I should have been the type who could get divorced but I never believed in divorce: it would just be the frying pan into the fire: marriage is never easy. Listen, I’m smart: I’d’ve liked to try my luck in Chicago, I’ve always been outstanding, I’ve always impressed people.…”
It seemed to me from what little I could remember about her when
I was little, and before Joe became ill, that she had interested the people around her. Everyone had looked at her wherever she went and people waited for her to arrive for the excitement to start. And they had been afraid of her too. When she was all dressed up—and even when she wasn’t—she often looked glamorous and interesting: she’d worn things like a black suit with wide lapels, very high-heeled black shoes, longish black gloves, a diamond bracelet on the outside of one glove, a fur neckpiece, fox heads biting their tails, a tight-fitting hat with a long feather fastened to it by a red jewel, and a veil drawn over her face; and behind the veil a very red lipsticked mouth.
I hadn’t as a child clearly understood what we were to each other. She’d been so different in her moods, she hadn’t ever seemed to be one person, to be the same person for long, to be the same person at all. When I was little, I’d been allowed to sit on her bed and watch her get dressed—this had been a privilege awarded me and a kind of joke and thing of affection. She’d been a slightly dumpy, slack-skinned, nervous woman with a wried mouth and eyes muddy with temper. She would arrange a towel around her shoulders and bosom while she sat at a vanity table, and then she would brush her hair; she would beat at her hair with the brush; she would stick out her chin and brace against the force of her brushing. What was wonderful was that as she brushed, a faint life, like a sunrise, would creep into her face—a smoothness; she’d be less wrinkled, less skewed in anger or impatience, in bitterness or exhaustion; a pinkness, very faint, would spread around the line of her hair; her face would not look so ashen then. Part of it was that her hair would begin to shine, part was that her face would reveal an increasing, magical symmetry, part was the life in her eyes, but she became pretty. I would stare at her reflection in the mirror. I had to keep looking at her because if I closed my eyes or ran out of the room, the prettiness would disappear from my head, and then I’d have to run back and look at her. Seated at the vanity table, she’d say things that were strange to me and grownup (I thought) and private. “I had good coloring when I was young but you know what they say: you don’t stay young forever.” Or “I look like a ghost.” On the spur of the moment she would change the curve of her eyebrows and the shape of her lips or use another shade of powder and of lipstick: it would be very strained while she did it, she would be intent and bold and willful, like a gambler. God, the hushed niceness of the looks, the romantic, whispery, gentle niceness she would often end with. Sometimes she tried for startlingly dramatic looks and got them
or partly got them; sometimes she failed and had to wipe her face clean and redo her hair and start over. She would get, at this point, if things seemed to be working, a blunt, broad, female, and sarcastic excitement, a knowing gaiety, a tough-fibered, angry pleasure and a despair that moved me. If I said, “You’re pretty, Momma,” she would say in the new voice of her new mood, “Do you think I’m the cat’s miaow?” Sometimes she would keep repeating that but in changing, softening voices until she came to a gentle, teasing voice, one as sweet as a lullaby with agreeable and patient inner themes. She was a complete strategist. Sometimes she would sing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” As if she was a man and was admiring herself. Sometimes her voice would be quavering and full of half-suffocated, real pleasure, readily amorous or flirtatious. I think she was always the first to be affected by her looks.
Three times that I can think of, when I was alone at home, I sneaked a look into my mother’s bureau, at her underwear … but also at her jewelry and handkerchiefs and sweaters: I wanted to see what was hidden. Other motives I pass over. Once, and maybe twice, I tried on a nightgown of hers and danced on the bed and saw myself in the bureau mirror. I don’t remember feeling that I was like a woman in any way. I can remember moments of wanting to be one, when I was fairly young—to wear a turban and be opinionated and run everything in the house and not ever have to prove myself—but the wish wasn’t sexual, so far as I know, or profound or long-lived. It was envy of women having power without having to serve apprenticeships for it. And also it was a daydream about safety and being taken care of and undoing some of the mistakes of having grown to be seven or eight years old: a woman, like a little boy, was a specialist in being loved.
My ignorance about women was considerable—why were women so secretive? I knew my mother and my sister faked just about absolutely everything they did with men, but why? Their temper, their good nature, their unhappiness, their happiness were almost always fake—but why? I didn’t understand what the need was for all the fraud.
No man or boy was ever permitted to be outspoken near a woman. In U. City, there weren’t too many docile, crushed women or girls; I didn’t know any. In U. City, women sought to regulate everyone in everything; they more or less tried to supersede governmental law, instinct, tradition, to correct them and lay down new rules they insisted were the best ones. Nearly everything they wanted from us—to be polite, to sit still, to be considerate, to be protective—was like a dumb
drumming of their wanting us to be like women. The rarest thing in a woman was any understanding of the male. And that wasn’t asked of them. Women were highly regarded, and in U. City it was considered profoundly wicked to be rude to any of them. One simply fled from them, avoided them. Their unjust claims. I mean we respected women as women, whatever they were as people.
I thought about my mother’s name, Doris Marie Rubenstein Brodkey, as mine. It seemed intensely silly to be called Doris. Then one day I thought about being a woman called Doris who was all dressed up and then was being pushed headfirst into a keg of oil. It was unbearable. And disgusting. I thought I had imagined what it was like to be Doris dying, to be a dying woman. I woke the next day from a night’s sleep having realized in my sleep I had not imagined my mother’s dying at all.
She was in her forties and she had cancer and she had some twist to her character so that she drove people away. People said she had “a bad mouth”—she was cutting and shrill, demanding, she said true things in full malice. The more I thought about being her, the more masculinely I held myself: even my thoughts were baritone.
She had an odd trait of never blaming herself, and nothing anyone ever said about her affected her in a way that led her to change. She never listened to my father at all, or to her mother, or her daughter, or her friends. That simmered in my head a few days before it took another shape. I was at football practice. We were running up and down the football field lifting our knees high as we were told. I was afraid of the coach. Suddenly it occurred to me my mother was undisciplinable, ineducable and independent: she refused to be controlled by sexual pleasure, so far as I could see, or by conventional notions of what was maternal or by what people thought or by their emotional requirements. But it was a queer independence and one of the mind or of the pride: she felt it in her mind: but it wasn’t what I’d call independence: she was tied to her family; she couldn’t conceive of moving far away; she couldn’t bear to be alone; she needed to have someone in love with her: she was independent of the claims of the person in love with her, but she needed the feelings directed at her for her to be independent of something. Time after time, after quarrels with certain friends or with her family, she would say, “I don’t care, I don’t need them,” but she was peculiarly defenseless and
always
let people come back, even if they were just wastes of time and drains on her energy. She couldn’t bear to lose anyone. She was like a creature without a shell and without claws
and so on—she was rather a soft person—and she sort of with her mind or mother wit made a shell and claws, and needed, and wanted, and pursued people, men and women, who would be part of her—of her equipment—who would care about her and outfit her and help her. She fawned on such people to get them to like her until she felt, correctly or paranoiacally, that they didn’t care about her, that they had failed her; then she would assail them behind their back for practice and when the scurrility was polished she’d deliver it to their faces.
It seemed hot and airless even to begin to work on imagining what it was like to be my mother.
One thing I did not know then but half know now was that I was not independent of her. I thought then I did not love her exactly; she struck me as having no aptitude for happiness, and so there was no point in being attached to her or having a lot of feeling about her—she’d only use it against me. I knew she was no mother in any conventional sense; she herself often said as much; but the fact that she was such a terrible mother made me feel aristocratic and amused as well as tired me: I saw other mothers charging around half destroying their kids, crippling them, blinding them, and I felt protective toward my mother—this was a dry, adolescently sarcastic, helpless feeling, almost part of my sense of humor, my sense of aristocracy, if I can call it that, this being protective toward her. Also, I figured that when I was an infant someone had been kind to me: I was comparatively strong physically, and surprisingly unfrightened of things, and I gave credit for this to Doris.
But I know now I was frightened of a lot of things; I just didn’t pay much attention to the fright. My ignorance, my character scared me. I could hide behind taking care of her. I leaned on the fact of having her near me; her presence, having to take care of her, supplied an answer to a lot of questions, supplied a shape. I didn’t have to know who I was. Girls pushed me around a lot: there was a dim shadowy hysteria in me about that. I didn’t often feel it, but I needed and resented Doris. I thought I was objective and emotionless and so on, but I wasn’t: she was important to me.
I had noticed that she never blamed herself, but then I saw that she never blamed any woman much, even women she was angry with; she’d say such and such a woman was selfish and a lousy friend and that she never wanted to see her again, but my mother really only launched diatribes against men. She had a brother who’d become rich, and she said he was ruled by his wife, that his wife kept this brother from being nice
to Doris, but what Momma did was stop speaking to her brother and she went on being friends with her sister-in-law.
I couldn’t see how Momma managed this presumption of sinlessness in women. Finally, I worked it out that she felt women were in an unfair situation, and had to do what they did. She never thought women were bound by honor or by any of the things men were bound by. At one point, enraptured with my daring, I wondered if my mother was basically a lesbian. But then it seemed to me she was much more afraid of women than she was of men, so maybe she was merely trying to get along with other women who were the real danger and so on.